The father distro of Ubuntu, Mint and other derivatives. Normally it is classified as "for advanced linux users". I am not a technical geek in any sense but currently running my P4 PC with Debian Wheezy. Debian has both stable (denotes tested & proven release, recommended by Debian), testing (on the way to become stable), unstable (in active development). Current stable distribution is Wheezy and testing is Sid.

Linux Mint

Mint, of late, is giving Mate & Cinnamon as well as KDE and XFCE as desktop environments which in turn are derived from Gnome 2 & 3 respectively. Essentially this is an Ubuntu derivative with a lot of features packed inside. I found it to work on any system.

Fedora

Another pivotal Linux distro with new release every year. It brings on the table what cutting edge Linux has to offer and is great for productivity purpose. I found Fedora to be highly stable and offer good performance. Fedora helps me to keep track of the latest happening in Redhat stable.Fedora comes in all flavors: Gnome, KDE, XFCE and LXDE.

ArchLinux clan

Arch itself with a derivatives like Manjaro, Bridge Linux, Archbang, etc. comprise the Arch clan. They are for those who love to experiment with bleeding edge Linux. You can be sure of getting the latest applications and kernels, before any other distro, if you are using Arch. I have Archbang installed on my P4 PC with 1 GB RAM and it runs like a beast offering incredible speed and performance. However, it is not for faint hearted as things may at times break and you may need to get your hands dirty.

I just learned of Clementine, D/L'ed it, Let it install and watched with wonder at the smoothness and completeness as it finished. I was SO GLAD I did not have to do that install myself. There sat a GUI this WinMediaPlayer user felt at home with. WOW!I was Set UP, Done, complete! BUT!I am addicted to MIDI file music. It would not recognise any MIDI's. WHA-A-A-A-A !

I dunno, clementine is good but seems bit to heavy. Audacious has been my choice of music player in long run. Also, SMplayer is one serious contender if you're bored using VLC. Some even claim it to be better, but I keep both of them around. Have you tested them? I would also like to see some individual alternative of PowerPoint, I don't like to install entire office suite for my miserly needs, you've any good suggestion?

I second SMplayer for it's wealth of options. One day in class I was showing a video where the subtitles where lagging behind the video constantly. Total running time of subtitles was longer than that of the movie. This had to be adjusted on the fly every minute or so, it was not enough to tweak the subtitle delay settings once. Sure enough, SMplayer had shortcuts for that. I was able to get through an hour of video without any student noticing I was constantly tweaking the subtitle timing. No other video player that I know of can do that on the fly using shortcuts, user has to go through menus which would ruin the experience for my students. SMplayer has a wealth of such rarely used options that come in really handy when you need them.

You should try and include SeaMonkey — it is just like Firefox was before Mozilla started making it look like a Chrome clone, can use many of the same extensions and has Thunderbird's capabilities (email, RSS/Atom, USENET) as well.